[Okay, this silliness has gone on long enough. We don't subscribe to birtherism on the site. If that's an itch you really feel needs to be scratched you're in the wrong place.

--streiff]

Last week Mr. Obama publically referred to the controversy surrounding his eligibility for the Office of the Presidency – and Allahpundit, writing for hot air, said this about Mr. Obama’s decision to raise the issue:

It’s newsworthy as a rare example of The One addressing Birthers directly and as proof of how useful this dopey controversy is to him, letting him take the high road – during a speech about faith, no less – vis-a-vis opponents looking to discredit him by all available means. The citizenship line is delivered almost as an afterthought, but I doubt it was unscripted: Remember, Birtherism is part of the Dems’ midterm strategy, to frighten indies into believing that the GOP’s too fringe-y to be trusted with governance.

I believe a lot of smart people want to agree with Allahpundit on this, but that the bitter truths of the birther issue do not – and as the denier vindication going on in the various climategate scandals shows, reality always triumphs in the end.

The importance of the birther issue is both simple and complex: simple because the bottom line reality of birther claims is blatantly obvious, and complex because birther reality is compounded out of deep emotional conflicts within themselves, among members of the birther community, and between birthers and those who try to use the label “birthers” to denigrate them.

Notice that there are two very different issues here: what’s right about birther beliefs, and what risks deniers run as pressures building inside the cauldron of birther emotional response seek outlets.

The most obvious conflict arises from the “birther” label, because most birthers adopting it know it’s a lie.

The term appears to have originated with, and was certainly popularized by, a number of major media players whose general zealotry on behalf of Mr. Obama’s perceived agenda leads easily to the assumption that the coinage incorporates a sneering reference to the 9/11 truthers with a sophisticated attempt to limit public attention paid birther concerns to the matter of Mr. Obama’s missing birth certificate.

In reality, however, relatively few birthers put the missing birth certificate at the center of their concerns. On the contrary, most see it only as simultaneously the easiest example to publicize of all the missing Obama documentation, and as the most glaring example of mass media hypocrisy in that the latter went full bore after proof that Sarah Palin’s son is really her’s and repeatedly demanded that John McCain prove his eligibility for office, but not only viciously attack anyone unwilling to accept an obviously inadequate profer as sufficient proof of Mr. Obama’s American birth, but appear to deliberately mislead their audience by conflating legal citizenship with natural citizenship.

What we don’t know about Mr. Obama

The traditional list of examples, lifted straight from Joseph Farah’s wnd.com, looks like this: Besides Obama’s actual birth documentation, the still-concealed documentation for him includes kindergarten records, Punahou school records, Occidental College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis, Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, passport, medical records, his files from his years as an Illinois state senator, his Illinois State Bar Association records, any baptism records, and his adoption records. The less canonical version makes the utterly absurd, but sadly correct, claim that we know more about North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il than about Mr. Obama – because we know who paid for Mr. Kim’s education; we know when, where, and to whom, he was born; we know his national and religious affiliations; and, he has not spoken convincingly on both main sides of every major issue.

The deeper conflict birthers feel is both more complex and more subtle. In general birthers are Americans who deeply love their country or foreigners, like me, who deeply love the American ideal of one nation, under law – and it’s the “under law” component here that carries the emotional firepower for birthers. Under the highest law of the American nation, The Constitution, Mr.Obama’s ineligibility for the office he pretends to is unquestionable – but moral law, and today’s social values, contradict that to catch birthers between two deeply held value sets.

The intellectual side is easy: Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution requires that the President be a natural born citizen and as long as Mr. Obama claims that his father was a Kenyan of British citizenship (by coincidence precisely the loyalty split the founders were concerned about and their successors fought a war over twenty five years later) he cannot be eligible for the office he pretends to.

The emotional one is harder: the constitution was written at a time when family rights and obligations descended exclusively through the father, but we now treat the mother as of equal importance – and since Mr. Obama’s mother is thought to have been an American at the time of his birth, the emotional response is to treat his electoral victories as a kind of jury nullification of this particular constitutional requirement.

About the certificate of live birth [COLB] released by Mr. Obama’s campaign

There are three separate issues here: The constitutional requirement that the president be a “natural born” citizen is not primarily about the candidate’s place of birth. It is primarily a requirement that the father be American. the COLB provided by the campaign has a fatal flaw in that it describes Mr. Obama’s father as “African”; a term not in use for Hawaiian birth documentation during the early 1960s.What seems to have happened was that Hawaii’s move to digital records enabled someone to let political correctness trump the legal need for facsimile reproduction and therefore change the original from “Negro” or “Negroid” to “African.” However, the legal maximum: “falsus in unum, falsus in omnia” applies, and this document therefore proves nothing without supporting testimony and production of the underlying records. A genuine Hawaiian COLB does not suffice to prove American birth.The Hawaiian COLB documented resident children up to one year of age regardless of their place of birth and required only that the guardian parent be ordinarily resident in Hawaii for the previous year.It appears, furthermore, that Hawaii 182 H.B. NO. 3016-82 allowed anyone to be issued valid Hawaiian birth certification on proving to the satisfaction of the Director of Health for Hawaii that the “legal parents of such individual while living without the Territory or State of Hawaii had declared the Territory or State of Hawaii as their legal residence for at least one year immediately preceding the birth or adoption of such child”.

And as if that isn’t conflict enough, there’s one that’s even more important: birthers tend to be people who respect the law, respect opposing viewpoints, and generally avoid both person to person and political conflict – but being a birther stands in opposition to all that: it means making yourself a target for the two ends of the democratic spectrum still supporting Mr. Obama: the unemployable illiterates whose forte is hate, and the weak minded public intellectuals whose forte is self-justifying mis-information.

To really understand how deep seated this conflict is, contrast the least reported of all consistent tea party phenomena: their neatness and politesse, with what happens when Mr. Obama’s supporters get together. Put 200,000 tea partiers on the lawn in front of the Washington monument, and they leave the place clean – but Obama’s people leave an open garbage dump behind them.

Every city holding an Obama rally both before and after the 2008 elections ended up with a garbage problem, a police overtime budget problem, and a collections problem when they went after the organizers. Tea parties and Palin rallies, in contrast, leave none of this hang-over – and people who don’t litter, don’t shout, and don’t address illiterate rants to editors also don’t want to get down and dirty in the birther conflicts.

Taken together these conflicts wouldn’t matter if the birther movement wasn’t growing – but it is, and in that growth there’s both danger and opportunity.

There’s danger, because the emotional load carried by birthers could be discharged into the tea party movement and the 2010/12 elections. After all, one of Mr. Alinksy’s more cogent bits of advice (cadged of course, from someone else) is that winners understand their enemy’s strengths, and use those strengths against them – and because the greatest strength of the tea partiers and birthers is that they’re basically decent Americans, Mr. Obama’s people may be able to build birther conflicts nearly to the point of explosion and then bleed all that energy into a “one brush tars all” rejection of conservative views (and any further discussion of his eligibility) by conflating birtherism with the tea party movement and then publically producing a genuine Hawaiian birth certificate.

The opportunity, of course, is in seizing the issue: educating the public to understand that it’s about where his allegiances are, not about where he was born -and including his prompt ejection from office in the November 2010 contract with America. campaign.

Everybody keeps talking about how conservatives, expecially American Republicans need better policies - but it's nonsense: what we need is better communications. Your policies can make perfect sense and be the right to answer to everything and yet convince no-one because the message gets blocked by the media. So what's the answer?

The mid April tea parties have come and gone - and nothing changed. Sure lots of people came out - and that's unusual for conservatives, but the bottom line is that nothing changed. Now lots of people are planning many more tea parties, but unless those tea parties gain a purpose beyond polite protest, they'll draw the same yawns and sneers the last round did - so I've thought of several things that could be achieved using tea party momentum and this article describes the first one.

So the tea parties produced the expected results - a big yawn and some gay jokes aimed at underlying the impotence of this form of protest. Now what? How about this: if congress removes Mr. Obama from office on grounds of ineligibility the world gets a do over on the past five months -the Pelosi-Reid debt bomb goes away, Detroit survives, you get to keep your job, and the threat of nuclear jihad recedes a bit. How? Every congressman and senator swore the same oath of office, an oath to uphold the Consttitution - an oath that's enforcible in the courts with removal from office as the primary penalty.

An open letter to former U.S.A.F. Captain John McCain asking him to launch impeachment and removal proceedings against Mr. Obama in Congress on grounds of constitutional ineligibility - reminding readers that because every member of Congress has sworn the same oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, failure to vote for the resolution can lead to that member's removal from office.

While the American economy burns down, the Whitehouse fiddles with its teleprompter - why? because Obama is doing what he knows how to do: campaigning - and people like Rahm, Pelosi, and Carville are filling the vacuum at the top.

As the country turns against Obama, as the 98% of voters who didn't knowingly vote for his program discover what they've done, there'll be a flareup in the general struggle for power and prominence . The people who put him in place will want him to resign, Clinton and Pelosi will try to clear the field for themselves, and those Republicans who can see past partisan hatreds will want him gone for the good of the country. This will be a race to depose - with huge stakes for everybody.

The Obama birth certificate business is, I think, more likely to be a con than not - i.e. it's probably something Obama's people are spreading so it can be discredited at the critical moment: the moment the mass media become interested. Why? because his father's British citizenship makes him technically ineligible for office - and his own failure to reclaim his American citizenship after his mother's renunciation of that status in Indonesia makes him politically ineligible.

The economy's a mess, the country's a mess, and civil discourse - is history. So now lots of people are asking how we got here, but I think that's the wrong question: the who dunnits can wait - what we need to be asking is: what now? How can we fix this?

If we weighed votes by voter knowledge of the issues, we'd say that Mr. Obama got an estimated 1.4 million informed votes, Mr. McCain, in contrast, got 20.5 million.

Many people have complained that the recent "stimulus" bill is really just a trojan horse for a vast array of agenda spending - but few have offered effective ways to reverse the whole far left takeover of the Democratic Party.

Here’s a terrible thought about Obama’s first couple of weeks: if America’s worst enemies were in control of the White House and Congress, what would they do differently?

Side with Hamas against Israel? Done. Release Al Quaida prisoners? In progress. Abandon American commitments to freedom worldwide – and particularly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Taiwan? In progress.

Create internment camps inside the United States? In progress. Stack the courts to reduce legislative precedence in social regulation? In progress. Reduce military budgets? In progress. Reverse the educational trend toward teaching basic skills? In progress. Stage show trials for Bushies? in progress. Reduce impediments to illegal immigration and welfare? In progress. Increase the power of unions, and thereby decrease economic productivity? In progress. Reduce internal dissent by silencing right wing radio and the blogosphere? In progress.

And how about destroying the free market system? That’s been a longer term project, but it’s in progress too.

The housing collapse, subsequent credit crunch, and consequent loss of solvency by major banks all have direct roots in democrat congressional action and misguided government intervention in the markets. The timing of the collapse contributed to bringing Obama, Pelosi, and Reid to near absolute power – and their proposed response, an enormous spending binge, is about to make matters a lot worse.

The reason the stimulus will make matters worse is simple and easily understood: you don’t spend your way out of a financial crisis, you earn your way out. Consider the family analogy: if your primary income disappears, can you fix the problem by borrowing? No. You can use minimal borrowing to get yourself to the point where new income comes in, but you can only fix your financial problem by going out and earning more money.

For the U.S. economy to recover the U.S. has to produce, not borrow, wealth. The recipe for doing that is well known: tax cuts lead to investment, investment creates jobs, the work done in those jobs creates wealth.

In thinking about this we need to be very clear about one thing: regulations impose costs and are therefore economically like taxes – and, conversely, the removal of onerous regulations is economically indistinguishable from a tax reduction.

So what regulations could most usefully be reduced? The linchpin on that list is CAFE – the fleet fuel economy constraints imposed by congress.

After fifty years of marketing Americans have been conditioned to believe that Detroit makes big, inefficient, vehicles; Asia makes small efficient vehicles; and, Europe makes either cheap junk or high cost and high prestige stuff. There is very little truth to any of this, but it has a significant real consequence: a small car made by Ford won’t sell against one labeled “Toyota” – even if the latter is actually made by GM in California.

That reality combines with another historical artifact: the structure of management obligations to labor in plants run directly by the “big three”. That structure means the companies’ make money selling the vehicles Americans want: big, heavy, fast vehicles providing safety and convenience on today’s freeways – but lose money on the vehicles mandated by CAFE that few customers actually want: small and light collapsibles without the power to compete on today’s streets and highways.

Thus removing the CAFE standards would remove the death sentence handed Detroit by congressional democrats – putting hundreds of thousands back to work, protecting millions of jobs, and costing the taxpayer nothing while giving back the American consumer’s right to free choice.

But what about other costs? After all CAFE was sold to and by democrats as a joint response to the short term cost of importing energy, the need to reduce CO2 emission in response to global warming, and the need to adapt our energy use pattern in response to the peak oil hypothesis.

America’s need to import energy is the direct result of regulation: remove the regulatory barriers to American energy production and that production will happen. Implementing Newt Gingrich’s “Drill Here, Drill now” for everything from oil and gas to nuclear will generate billions in new American wealth along with hundreds of thousands of American jobs and enough energy to shift the balance of world financial power back to the United States.

Al Gore to the contrary, using these resources will not trigger a climate Armageddon: what is known of the historical record shows that CO2 accumulations follow, and do not lead periods in which global average temperatures have apparently risen; the average temperatures known to have occurred in Europe and Asia during the medieval warming period not only seriously exceeded those recorded in the same areas in 1998 (the hottest recent year) but completely failed to wipe out the polar bear or otherwise significantly affect the arctic ecology; and, the lock step atmospheric expansion seen on Earth, Mars, Venus, and Pluto in the twenty five years prior to about 2000 have now reversed to an equally lock step contraction – a reality that writes an absolute finis to the human causation argument.

The peak oil hypothesis makes the apparently reasonable argument that the earth’s oil and gas resources are finite and therefore that using them will eventually lead to scarcity – but this is wrong. In reality burning oil does not destroy its constituents, it merely liberates some of the chemical energy stored in its molecular bonds. As a result the long run answer is that nuclear energy can be used to make arbitrary amounts of oil from water and atmospheric gasses – and the short term answer is that free flowing oil and gas typically represent a few percent of the real reserve in each known field – and as scarcities produce price increases tapping the rest becomes increasingly economically viable.

Thus reversing CAFE and implementing the Drill Here, Drill now program would, together, stop the slide into depression – and leave only market uncertainty as the remaining economic threat.

That can only be dealt with through political action: through the stimulation of shared belief in a positive future: one in which the rules are known, government doesn’t play favorites, and business decisions are made by business people, not politicians, bureaucrats, or judges.

Thus for the battle of Obama to become the GOP’s finest hour – a battle generations of Americans will celebrate – two things are needed:

1. an absolute commitment to impeaching this president right after the 2010 elections put enough honest people into both houses of congress to do it; and,
2. an equally absolute commitment to oppose democrat missrule in all its forms, starting by forcing the repeal of the CAFE legislation and the implementation of the full Drill here, Drill now program instead of incurring a trillion dollar deficit, and ending only with the defeat and possible prosecution of corruption from Franks to Obama, and from Pelosi to Reid.

So how?

Attack Obama in every possible way, and on every possible ground: explore every vulnerability from citizenship and eligibility to terrorist connections – throw gasoline on every misstep, expose the corruption of his allies and the moral bankruptcy allowing him to agree with both sides on everything while actually pursuing a far left agenda.

And do the same in congress: get people working now to target every democrat running in 2010: make gutting Obama and punishing those responsible for the current economic mess a centerpiece of every campaign – be clear with everyone: his agenda cannot stand scrutiny, so you will scrutinize. Make it absolutely clear that the GOP will move to impeach just as soon as it’s legally and electorally possible to do so. Make every congressional election, every senate election, about Obama: not about policies, not about local players and personalities: about Obama – about all the mistakes he’ll make, about the economic disaster his friends have created, about the foreign policy setbacks and diminutions of freedom democrat reign is bringing about.

When you win, and you will, then you’ll face the next great challenge: helping rebuild the democratic party as an opposition to be proud of.

I want to suggest a three part program aimed at restored sanity:

1. Deny Obama the halo of election.
   

   
   Attack, attack, attack: on electoral fraud, on financial fraud, on cronies, on abortion, on contacts with Hamas, on media bias, on eligibility, anything and everything.
   

   
   Do what McCain wouldn’t: get down and dirty and make it clear that he will be impeached and removed from office the day after Republicans elected to the House and Senate in 2010 are sworn in.
   

   
   

2. Focus on 2010.
   

   
   Commit every party resource, every effort, to sweeping the House, the Senate races, and the governor’s mansions in 2010.
   

   
   In particular, fight every action taken in congress to limit human and economic freedom: make repeal in 2011 the automatic corollary to anything that gets past the defenders in both the house and senate.
   

   
   

3. Use the Office of the Presidency to protect the United States from Obama’s extremism.
   

   
   Mr. Bush has to act and can act – against tradition, but for the United States: on defense, on the economy, on appointments, and on electoral reform. In each case he can both do the right thing, and create situations in which the idealogues in the House and Senate will be forced to antagonize their “blue dog” colleagues while publically choosing to support Obama over their country and their constituents.
   

   
   Some examples:
   

   
   

   • Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Obama’s campaign finances. There’s no reasonable doubt that he received illegal contributions and did not reject them, there is no reasonable question about whether this was against the law. He should not get away with it simply because he appears to have won election.
     

     
     

   • Appoint a special prosecutor to look into vote fraud – from ACORN through to counting process issues in the various states. A federal investigation co-ordinated with the various states attorney’s general is needed to ensure the integrity of the voting result.
     

     
     

   • Appoint a special prosecutor to pursue charges, particularly with respect to executives and legislators acting on payoffs, against those involved in the Fannie/Freddie frauds.
     

     
     

   • On energy, the President can cite a national economic emergency to directly issue permits for drilling, recovery operations, and both nuclear and coal plant construction.
     

     
     

   • On the economy, the President can suspend the CAFE standards, suspend Sarbanes-Oxley (at a minimum suspend FASB 157), and direct that the mortgage bailout funds be spent entirely, or as nearly so as may now be possible, to support a new federal mortgage authority whose job it is to bet on Americans: through a leveraged buy up of home mortgage risk.
     

     
     A simple announcement now: “we will do this, hold foreclosures” and the credit crunch goes away – without another penny for bailouts to institutions and with a good chance that virtually all of the money can be recovered over time.
     

     
     

   • On defense, the President can order a number of purchases and deployments. For example, he could order that the tankers be purchased from Boeing, that SDI be allocated more funds, and that all forces personnel now stationed in Germany be brought home as quickly as possible.
     

     
     

   • On foreign affairs the President can order full recognition, including support for its membership in the United Nations, of Taiwan.
     

     
     

   • On show trials for Republicans, the President can issue a general pardon – allowing for prosecution only when clear criminal code violations have been proven to exist before this President’s term expires.

Each one of these actions will enrage the press, enrage opposed interest groups, and draw the harshest possible condemnations from congressional democrats. But so what? Once they’re done, they’re done – and in both the House and the Senate there are enough sane democrats to make them almost impossible for Obama, Reid, and Pelosi to reverse.

And what of 2010 and beyond? Beyond 2010 we have the big issues – the ones Republicans like to fight about: God, Country, personal freedom, and community – but lets take care of the little things first: things like restoring the economy, restoring electoral fairness, and reversing whatever damage he’s done in international affairs and defense.

1. On July 2, in Colorado Springs, you said: “We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
   

   
   On July 20th, you told Face the Nation correspondent Lara Logan that you expect to be dealing with various world leaders as president for the next eight to ten years.
   

   
   On April 14th you told Will Bunch that:
   

   
   

   I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General — having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now — are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important– one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity.

   
   

   
   A lot of people take your actions and these statements in the context of your known long term associations with unreformed and unrepentant domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers and hard line Maoist supporters like Mike Klonsky, to draw conclusions about you planning to become a Mugabe like president for life – complete with an American KGB for enforcement and show trials for your political enemies.
   

   
   That kind of thinking seems a little paranoid – but what did you actually mean when you made these statements?







2. How did you get to Harvard? Your mother took you to Indonesia, your father doesn’t seem to have contributed anything, the grandmother who looked after you in Hawaii took the bus to work – and yet you attended a very expensive private school. From there you went to Occidental College in L.A. – a school noted both for its exclusivity and the left wing tilt of its faculty, two years later you moved to Columbia, and from there to Harvard Law. Who paid for all this? who made the phone calls or wrote the letters smoothing your way?
   

   
   Someone motivated a major publisher to seek you out while you were still just a student at Harvard – for a book that turned into your first autobiography. Who was it?
   

   
   When did you meet your friend Khalid al-Mansour and what role your cousin Raila Odinga play in all of this?







3. You’ve consistently opposed using American forces to take out governments providing direct or indirect support for the people who attack Americans in Lebanon, in Kenya, in Nigeria, in the Sudan, in New York, in Washington, and over Pennsylvania.
   

   
   Your critics say that presenting your position on the use of military force in war leverages an obviously popular position – nobody wants war – but it’s been unclear whether you’re doing that just to get yourself elected or specifically to intervene on behalf of people who attacked us.
   

   
   Now it seems you actively intervened in US/Iraq negotiations to pressure the Iraq government to delay troop draw downs and the implementation of a status of forces agreement. On the positive side that suggests your anti-war position is purely electoral posturing, but what can you say to people in both the United States and Iraq whose children’s lives you put on the line for this?







4. If you’re really sincere about your opposition to war and commitment to helping people develop democratically, why have you never done anything to suggest any interest in building anti-war sentiment among the people who started the war on terror by practicing terror against us?
   

   
   In other words, you claim that we’re prosecuting the wrong war against the wrong people and this is causing irreparable harm to America’s reputation – but you must know who attacked whom, and yet you never talk about shutting down the other side.
   

   
   Your critics say that the kind of unilateral American withdrawal you advocate would destabilize the world and lead to widespread wars of aggression and repression – but that even minor moderation among the world’s worst offenders: Iran, North Korea, and multi-national terror groups like Hezbolah, would bring the opportunity for world wide peace and prosperity.
   

   
   And yet, you never address yourself to them: it’s always America that has to change, never the actual aggressors. Why is that?







5. You’ve consistently opposed all efforts to curb late term and live birth abortions.
   

   
   On abortion your critics say that leaving a child born alive to die amounts to cold blooded murder – and cite your actions in the Illinois senate to “prove” that you support exactly that.
   

   
   Are they right? and, if not, how do you explain your actions?







6. In the senate you have consistently opposed earmark reform – with the exception that on March 14 of this year you voted with John McCain and 27 other senators for an amendment that would have banned them.
   

   
   Your critics say that you betrayed your word to McCain on the follow-up, knew the amendment was doomed, and used your vote for the amendment to bludgeon your primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the press as more guilty than you – because the senate democratic leadership only gave you $98 million to her $342.
   

   
   This year you’ve publically supported a moratorium on earmarks, but asked for $900 million and supported giving 20% of anything the taxpayer gets back on the bailout to ACORN – an organization widely considered likely to become the subject of criminal investigation for voter fraud, and an organization with which both you and your friend Mr. Ayers have close ties.
   

   
   To your critics this behavior looks irresponsible, hypocritical, and self-serving – but if they’re wrong, how do you explain your actions?







7. Your critics say that except on abortion and the war you’ve been largely non committal or inconsistent on major issues. For example, you voted “present” 130 in the Illinois senate – exerting real influence only to favor live birth abortions.
   

   
   They say that over the year or so you spent in the Senate before launching your presidential campaign, you took no strong positions, authored no bills, and voting with the party leadership 97% of the time. Since then, they say, you’ve been for The Jeremiah Wright brand of black power; and against it; you’ve been for raising taxes, and against raising taxes; for domestic energy development; and against domestic energy development; for NAFTA, and against NAFTA, for middle America when you need their votes and contemptuous of them for clinging to God and guns when fund raising among the rich and elite.
   

   
   Can you now answer those critics by telling us what your positions are on these issues?







8. Your campaign has picked up and amplified numerous personal, and erroneous, attacks on Sarah Palin lately and you’ve just released an ad consisting entirely of people calling John McCain a liar. When you clenched your nomination in Denver, John McCain paid for a television ad congratulating you; on the budget amendment cited earlier he reached across the aisle to you; your appearance with him at the 9/11 commemoration in New York recently was in response to his invitation.
   

   
   Throughout this campaign your officials have launched or supported actions designed to shut down opposition voices: mass emailings to your supporters asking them to shut down interviews with Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso on Chicago’s WGN talk radio, the ESwinner smear campaign against Sarah Palin, threats of legal action against anyone airing the NRA ads exploring your track record on guns, an appeal to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Keeney asking for government action to shut down your critics at The American Issues Project, and even the formation of truth squads made up from high level law enforcement officials in Missouri dedicated to stifling any criticism of you or your campaign.
   

   
   Just last week john McCain suspended his campaign to do his job as a senator – and asked you to do the same. He went to Washington and was instrumental in hammering out a compromise position – you went to the gym and continued debate preparation until President Bush effectively ordered you to attend a key meeting at the White House – where reports have you being disruptive and completely partisan.
   

   
   When your critics look at your record they see you using the sleaziest, most obviously partisan, tactics anyone has ever seen in a national campaign -and against a guy who’s obviously the real thing at that.
   

   
   How do you answer them?







9. If elected president you will take the oath of office – an oath that will have you swearing to uphold the constitution of the United States. Do you plan to take the oath as written? And, if so, how do square that with your repeated attacks on the first and second amendments? your commitment to judicial activism? and your recent actions in Iraq, Germany, and Afghanistan to intervene in the executive operation of American foreign policy?






10. Your party, the American democratic party of which you are now the de facto leader, has taken strong positions your critics characterize as anti-democratic: thus the fairness bill appears intended to silence right wing talk radio, the free choice bill removes free choice from votes on unionization, and the drilling bill bans drilling. At the same time your party demands more transperancy from Republicans, cites Abramoff as sufficient proof of Republican electoral corruption – but protects people like Murtha, Rangel, Jefferson, and Franken while you bring people like Raines and Johnson directly into your campaign as senior advisors.
    

    
    If I said that your party now more resembles the governing elite in a banana republic than the democratic ideals of someone like Joe Lieberman, how would you, on behalf of your party, respond?